Entries Tagged as 'Internet'

I have recently added a clock on the right side of my page here that shows two date-and-times. It’s pretty obvious what they are. The reason I put this up is because I am acutely aware of this time of my life as a fixed period. There is a start date and an end date to all this, and it’s coming up one second at a time. I have often thought this of many situations I have been in, both good and bad, so I wanted a way to show time slip from one side of the present to the other. A river of time, and me stuck on a bridge spanning it, watching it pass below.

It was apparently also on minds at Cambridge who made this clock. Mind you, mine cost slightly less than their quoted $2 Million pricetag (How the heck does that even happen?). I understand Stephen Hawking presented the clock as part of his theoretical commitment that the forward movement of time is inevitable. I just presented mine myself. I kept that article and a video showing the clock behind this link.

I’m just having a coffee in the kitchen and reading the news, as I do from time to time. An article popped out at me and I thought I would put it here. People sometimes don’t really understand why I don’t like Microsoft, so this is a little tidbit of stuff that makes me think that way.

The context is, last night I booted to Linux on my laptop and clicked the update button, to update to the new Ubuntu I talked about here. I kinda tossed and turned thinking I might be risking my working install of everything else. It probably took a couple hours to do, but thats only because it would have taken that long to download the 750 MB of stuff it needed to update. In the morning, I woke up to one dialogue box saying click to reboot and finish update. It worked perfectly. Wireless card works now, everything, and all my customizations from the other install remain. Perfect.

Not so perfect for M$ business customers who found that updates that were forced on their systems automatically CORRUPTED their business data. Good luck getting that back, I hope it doesn’t cost you too much time, money and productivity! It’s called work for a reason! Thanks Redmond.

The latest version of Ubuntu Linux was released last night. I hopped on the download band[width]wagon right away, as I usually do for Ubuntu, every six months. They put out new editions every April and October. This new one is called Hardy Heron, and is numbered 8.04 which really just corresponds to the 4th month of ’08.

The previous edition was 7.10 and called Gutsy Gibbon. The developers of the distribution have taken some very impressive large strides towards usability recently. The big step in Gutsy was the ability to natively read and write to NTFS partitions. Not really something you’d think about until it was a problem. Gutsy was great, but on my new laptop it didn’t take full advantage of the hardware. Specifically the WIFI didn’t work properly out of the box. It would connect easily enough to open wifi hotspots but not at all to encrypted ones. The issue was the chipset (Intel 4965AGN) was just a bit too new for the driver to make it into the kernel, the core part of the linux OS when Gutsy was released. There was a way to monkey around and get it to work by adapting the available windows driver, but I haven’t had the time or patience to do it this year. This time however the driver is there and works with no fuss at all. The other big difference is a better utilization of my graphics card and system resources. A small but significant unexpected improvement is that my extra mouse buttons now work, making web surfing a lot easier, and the transfer back and forth from Winblows easier.

These few small changes could make Linux my main desktop, only switching to M$ for minor unsupported things. I don’t have time to do a harddrive install right now though. It will probably be June before that happens. It only takes 15 minutes, so I do have the time, but I don’t have time for any unforseen complications! So I will wait and see. Right now I will have to suffice with the LiveCD. If anyone wants to check it out you can download it and burn it for free. Just go to www.ubuntu.com and grab it. Throw it in the cd drive and get ready to experience OS freedom! It doesn’t change anything on your system unless you actually install it. Please be careful though. I have found that if you are aware of a viable option, it’s way easier to hate the ways of Redmond.

I am writing this from my home. Literally in my bed, which is great because up until now I have been unable to connect from home, through my cell phone. It was extremely frustrating, and I even spent an hour on the phone with the provider’s tech support to no avail. Even he gave up, and said he’d have someone call me.

Then, the solution came to me in a dream. Not really, but it did come to me. See, to speak to people in Canada, I run a program on my phone that connects to a Canadian phone number. I thought maybe this is somehow getting in the way of the computer connecting. Sure enough, turn off the program, and click! it’s on, no problem.

So it’s great, and now I have internet wherever I go.

Which brings up a new, good problem. Internet wherever I go is no longer good enough, since I now have a roommate. His name is Brian and is in the Med program. From the east coast of Canada. So I’ll be getting more internet soon. And some more furniture. (Fridge and washer are in.)